The investigations began after Evdokas published an article this spring relating to a referendum, dubbed the Annan Plan after the UN secretary general, which was presented to the Cypriot people as “the last chance” to reunify their island.

As the Militant has reported on several occasions, far from a formula for reunification, the plan institutionalizes partition along ethnic lines, prevents the return of most refugees, and further entrenches intervention on the island by London, Athens, and Ankara.

The Cypriot authorities went as far as to interrogate Evdokas’ family. A public campaign has forced the Cypriot police to admit that it is carrying out the investigation, after orders from the U.S. embassy. Support has come from many quarters, including the Union of Editors in Cyprus, regardless of their stance on the referendum.

Evdokas is a long-time activist in rapprochement efforts between the island’s Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot communities, divided since the 1974 coup by Athens and subsequent invasion by Ankara.

Supporters are asking for statements demanding that this harassment stop to be sent to the Embassy of Cyprus and the U.S. embassy in your country, or to the U.S. State Department for those in the United States.

Natasha Terlexis
Athens, Greece
 
 
Native Americans
In a letter printed in the June 7 Militant, Nehi Katawasisw, a member of the Pipihkisis Cree First Nation takes issue with some of the main points raised in a “Books of the Month” club article on George Novack’s “Genocide against the American Indians”.

Katawasisiw says Novack “characterizes ‘our’ (Indian) social organization incorrectly …” He goes on to argue that the ancient Cree social organization was not a form of primitive communism: “We Cree people did not consider the land as our property…”

But it is Katawasisiw who has made the incorrect assumption here. To describe North American Native social organization as a form of primitive communism involves no such assumption that Native Tribes considered the land as their “property.” In a section of the Chapter “The conquest of the Indians” from the book America’s Revolutionary Heritage that was not in the original column printed in the Militant, Novack explains this clearly:

“Above all, the North American Indians knew no such thing as private property in land, which is the basis of all other kinds of private ownership in the means of production. When the whites arrived, there was not one acre from the Atlantic to the Pacific that belonged to a private person, that could be alienated from the community or assigned to anyone outside the tribe.” (pp. 28--29)

It is based on these facts of tribal collectivism in North American Indian social life, facts that were well documented over a century ago, that justify the conclusion that Indian social organization at the time of the arrival of European settlers could still be characterized as a form of primitive communism.

Finally, Katawasisiw misses completely the political importance of the these facts of Indian social life and why the capitalist class and it’s paid apologists in academia distort, efface, and cover up this history. Novack, in the same article, explains… “An understanding of the customs of the Indians and the reasons for their extinction may raise doubts about the immortality of private property and the standards of bourgeois life. …Does it not indicate that, at least so far as the past is concerned, communism is not quite so alien to American soil as it is pictured by the witch-hunters?” (pp. 25-26)

Mike Galati
New York, New York

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.  
 
 
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